H.S. GIRLS LACROSSE: Abington authors turnaround

Not so long after low participation numbers threatened the program, Abington has established itself as an up and coming contender – and has a tournament berth to prove it.

Mike Loftus The Patriot Ledger

ABINGTON – This hasn’t been easy. How could it have been?

Programs that win only a handful of games over a three-year period, after all, don’t simply morph into no-doubt-about-it playoff squads less than two years later without putting in a lot of hard work.

Abington High School’s girls lacrosse team has certainly done that. Not so long past the days when the program was threatened with extinction because of low participation numbers, the Green Wave has qualified for the Div. 2 South Sectional tournament for just the second time in its 11-year history, and first since 2011.

At the same time, there was a little less to do than might have been expected to turn a program that went winless in 2013 and won just once in 2014 into a team that took only 11 games to chalk up the nine victories needed to qualify for the 2017 tournament.

“We made a couple of easy adjustments, and the kids bought into it,” said Meredith McManus, Abington’s second-year coach.

“That’s the key, and that’s how it’s been with these kids. They’re willing to learn. Their ears are always open. They listen, they adjust. You can’t ask for any more than that.”

It may not have seemed so to those who merely checked won-loss records, but McManus found more in place than anticipated when she moved from Cardinal Spellman High School, where she’d coached that school’s girls lacrosse team since its 2012 inception, to Abington for the 2016 season.

“When I was at Spellman, we played (Abington) twice, and we beat them twice,” McManus recalled. “We were a brand-new program at Spellman, so when I took the job here, I remember thinking, ‘I’ve got a lot of work ahead with these kids.’

“But honestly, it really wasn’t a lot of work.”

To be sure, the coach had to run her share of basic training for new players, most of whom didn’t come through a youth program. But McManus did, in fact, have players – a commodity that had recently been in short supply.

Kate Casey, Abington’s girls soccer coach, associate athletic director and director of the school’s health and physical education department, and athletic director Peter Serino get the credit there. They literally went on recruiting trips – albeit short ones – to keep the program populated.

“When Coach Casey took over the team, we were walking up and down the halls saying to kids, ‘You’re not playing a sport; we need you to play lacrosse so we can field a team,’” Serino said. “Three or four years ago, when our record wasn’t great, we only had 13, 14 players. We were checking the attendance every day, to see if we had enough players for a game.”

Casey managed to hand McManus a group of players who were enthusiastic about the sport and the program, and the new coach found more talent than the Green Wave’s recent records showed. McManus felt that way right from an inauspicious start.

“We opened up with a big loss to Archbishop Williams – 17-3,” McManus recalled. “But I said ‘I really like our pieces; we’re going to be OK.’ I really could see that we had the pieces. We just had to find a way to put them together.”

The Green Wave had a defensive leader in Angela Varney, who’s now a senior co-captain. Classmate Maggie Cawley, also a co-captain (her older sister Katie, a former AHS lacrosse player, is now a volunteer assistant coach) was about to break through as a scorer. Courtney McCabe, then a sophomore, showed offensive potential.

The Green Wave’s collection of raw talent and enthusiasm, mixed with a bit of experience, embraced their new coach’s X’s and O’s changes (most importantly a switch to zone defense from man-to-man) and went 8-12 last year – just two wins short of a tournament berth.

“It felt so much different,” said Cawley, who scored 69 goals – two short of then-sophomore McCabe’s 71. “As a team, we just connected so much better than we did when I was a freshman and sophomore.”

That connection has carried over to this year, which has also been one of development: Cawley (62 goals, 10 assists) and McCabe (48, 18) have been supported by junior Marissa Golden (22, 12), senior Marina Brennan (16 goals), promising freshman Kaitlyn Dosenberg (10 goals) and others. Junior Caitlin Diver has become a smart, dependable defender. Jessica Rix, a freshman who had never played the position before, has been a revelation in goal.

It’s been a great experience for the seniors – Cawley, Varney, Brennan, Kayce DeAngelis, Melanie Beaver, Molly Donovan and Santina Vanasse – many of whom endured a one-win freshman year, and some who have competed for Abington’s more established and historically successful sports programs. South Shore League games against state powerhouses Norwell (three Div. 2 championships in the last four years) and Cohasset are now an exception: Abington, 10-3 entering this week, takes the field expecting to win, and kicks itself after losses like Thursday’s 10-9 decision to Rockland – something of a hangover game, played two days after a 15-4 win over East Bridgewater clinched the coveted tournament berth.

“We came into this not even knowing how to play,” Varney said. “Freshman and sophomore year, we’d go into games thinking ‘All right, let’s get a couple goals.’ That would be the goal – just to score. Now, all the work has paid off.

“I never would have thought freshman year that this is where we’d end up, and I’m so proud of how far we’ve come. We dug ourselves out of a hole, and came out on top.”